What is the purpose of the split() method in Python?

The split() method in Python is used to split a string into a list of substrings, based on a specified separator. The separator can be a character or a string, and the split() method returns a list of the substrings that were separated by the separator.

Here's an example of using the split() method to split a string into a list of words:

sentence = "This is a sentence."
words = sentence.split()
print(words)

# Output:
# ['This', 'is', 'a', 'sentence.']

In this example, the split() method splits the string sentence into a list of words, using a whitespace character as the separator.

You can also specify a different separator if you need to split the string based on a different character or string:

email = "user@example.com"
parts = email.split("@")
print(parts)

# Output:
# ['user', 'example.com']

In this example, the split() method splits the string email into a list of two parts, using the @ character as the separator.

The split() method is useful when you need to extract individual elements from a string, such as when working with text data.